In terms of the game's core, yes, it's pretty much complete. But as a coder myself (largely embedded systems, but done some application work), I know it is often that last 10% which will take the bulk of your time.

I myself have made enough RP in the last 3 weeks to get a fully loaded MK16 for my assault, and both Mark II devices with inserts, as well as the lvl 17 armor and a few other shotguns that I dont use. And I still have about 6k RP left over that I have not spent. I started this phase with less than 300 RP total. So you are either doing something SERIOUSLY wrong, or you are blowing smoke out of your unmentionables.

Second: You were in about 60 percent of the games I played last week, and you were never once MVP or even in the top 5 on your team.

I always take note of the people I play with if they are good, and the only reason I remember you is that you spent almost every match typing away in chat and harassing the players on the other team who had higher level guns than you did, while they repeatedly shot you in the face. All you did was complain about their guns, and call people noobs because they werent using what you considered a "fair" weapon.

As to your losing every round for hours on end.... did you ever stop to think about the one thing in every game you played that was constant? yeah: YOU.

Dont take your fail and blame it on UBI and say they arent done with their coding yet. This game is far more polished than most of the shooters I have payed for on release in the last 5-7 years. It is only going to get better, and if you cannot handle the high levels of competition that have been getting dished out in this very limited beta, then you are going to be very dismayed when the general public gets their hands on it and tears you a new one with some of the awesome skilled players that have yet to touch this GEM of a shooter.

The game is not ready. Plain and simple. Thethread topic post makes some valid points, as do others, about gamplay issues. But my reasons for saying it is not ready have to do with the stability of the program itself.

Over the past few days, I've had six crash back to the desktop program failures, with three very different reasons, all connected to issues within the program itself.

The Network manager had internal errors, the AI had big problems with the Team List Builder (occured more times than other errors), and could not deal with two teams with multiple fireteams. And, there was at least one error that crashed so completely it didn't stop until it was all the way back at the desktop (could have been two).

This has nothing to do with graphics or animation "polish" as the appologists might want to attempt to reframe the problems. This has nothing to do with matchmaking (per se) or with spawn camping or any of the miriad "need more players" or "your really gonna suck when there are more players" or other simple headed misdirection. This is seriously flawed programming error that make it unfit for open release.

If the small number of people playing now are getting disconnected, spend 10 - 20 minutes in matchmaking while there are two hundred people playing, and systems capable of playing the most advanced games today have grpahic and server lag so bad that at times the game is purely unplayable, dumping hundreds or thousands of new players into the game is unqestionably going to make the experience so bad that it will give the game such a bad name no one will return.

I, and most other players (not the delusional apple polisher, teacher's pet few) have also, over the past month, experienced numerous disconnects in-game so bad they break the fireteam and for no explainable reason dump everyone unceremniously back to the lobby. How is putting more players into the game going to fix that? It has been around as long as I know, and still has not been addressed to any meaningful extent.

And, not buying the "animation doesn't match what really happened" - BS. I and pretty much everyone else KNOWS that there are times I have been behind thick brick walls, and have been there for 10 - 20 seconds, only to have mysterious curving bullets travel around big piles od plywood or steel I-beams to inexplicably kill me - first shot. Right through the yellow marked and rivetted heavy cover. NOT POSSIBLE, unless the hit box is WAY bigger than the real target.

Grenades that go WAY past where one is hiding, mysteriously actually physically hit (it sounds like a coconut being hit, not an explosion) and kill one, then right at the end of deathcam, you see the explosion some distance away.

Shooting a full 150 round magnum LMG clip and seeing the red hit dots all over the opponent and yet they do not die, then at the end of the clip (this is not animation mismatch, this is a long time, if you've never emptied and LMG clip) THEY kill YOU with ONE SHOT. This is not polished, unless one considers a turd to be capable of being polished.

Going into Support in-game, or the Leaderboards only to have the dialog freeze up, with no way to close out, since the freeze ghosted out the only close button is not polished. And, don't try that assinine "game must be corrupt" nonsense, or that BS about clearing IE cache and cookies. It is not a user based issue, unless one believes that dozens of people with the same problem is explainable as that. That is a program problem and shows a distinct LACK of polish.

I know a handful of people who put real money into Ghost Coin who had real issues the whole time. From disappearing purchased ordinance to never recieving the purchased GC to disappearing GC. Imagine how a public that isn't getting their purchases returned as part of the testing will feel whenthier purchases simply disappear or they never even get thier GC in the first place. Throwing more people at that is not going to fix it, it will only get that much worse.

Already over the past month, I tracked about fifty newcommers who played one or two games, found actual program quality issues so bad that they simply never returned. I friended about 30 n00bs, never to see them again. And, I was trying to rank up, and played way too many hours (or not played, as the case may be, since I spent more time with crashes, disconnects and twenty minute searches than actually playing), so I did not just miss them.

Dumping thousands of more people into a game with such serious program stability isssues as most people have seen over CB Phase 3 have seen will only ensure that many more people who will play only one or two games to never return again.

You apple polishers and teachers pets calling this a gem of a shooter need to get your collective heads out of teacher's bottom and smell the coffee. GRO COULD be a highly polished gem of a game, but at this point, it is not. GRO simply is NOT ready for open beta, unless the goal is the make already bad craches and disconnects and lag as bad as possible so the game fails publicly. If you really think this is a highly polished game compared to what you have, then you must have gotten some really bad clinkers. I own over 100 games and have played thousands more over the past three decades, and CB tested somewhere around a hundred, and very few have had the serious program stability and playability issues this one still sports.

Good for you. You are not indicative of the problems. Asking for an explaination that was just given is you being a jerk, apple polishing, teacher's pet, troll. All you are trying to do is polish a turd. Give it up, most people have had these issues, and more. If you did not, then you were not playing.

All that, and add in spawn camping at the drop offs in Shearwater and the Towers. Yeah, only an apple polisher thinks dominating the drop will get better if we just add more players. Only a trollfaced teacher's pet could excuse that sort of unfixed map mis-design. I'm not going to post stats, like some have clearly manufactured. That proves nothing.

Or, how about the "run of shame" that happens in some maps, were one team is always at a disadvantage, because if they loose that central point, they always have further (far is correct but it seems to make a bad word in the middle of a real word, so it gets smashed by a misprogrammed censor) - sometimes twice as far to run than the other team if they lost that same point.

None of these very real problems (Mr. bad logic apple polisher never had a problem liar) indicate a game ready for market.

BTW, Ray. I note that YOU JUST JOINED on June 28th and I was the ONLY ONE who bothered to visit your page. Note that I have been a member since December of 2009. I have had many people visit my page. Your opinion, in the face of heavily documented real issues that most people have had, is totally valueless.

That last 15% is a game killer. No other game I own crashes all the way to the desktop, let alone six times in less than a month. Does GRFS crash on a regular basis?

Saying that one can not expect a perfect game to be pushed live is misdirection. It glosses over serious issues with a pollyanna attitude.

If publishers are unwilling to listen to closed beta testers' REAL concerns about serious problems, then why have them in the first place? They would scrap the game just because they won't address serious issues? That is the definition of insanity.

"UBI can't afford to continue years of beta testing on a free to play game" - That is a good example of really bad logic. Push a game live and ensure it becomes irrelevant just because it has taken a while to get to where it is. How many years did it take to develope Assassins Creed? I've played AC since as early as it was available - it has never, ever crashed, not one single time.

Sure, the game is fun - when one gets to play, teamplay aside.

Some people will play with anything they find in the gutter. That does not indicate in any way that it is ready for the public

This conversation is very interesting and honestly, am glad you guys are discussing it and letting us all know your opinions on it. And please note, I am speaking to those of you on both sides of the issues. Please keep up the great debate and thanks for remembering to state your sides with respect

Just one note that I wanted to touch on as this is relevant:

Originally Posted by RealHempman

"UBI can't afford to continue years of beta testing on a free to play game" - That is a good example of really bad logic. Push a game live and ensure it becomes irrelevant just because it has taken a while to get to where it is. How many years did it take to develope Assassins Creed? I've played AC since as early as it was available - it has never, ever crashed, not one single time.

Assassin's Creed is a game you MUST pay for in order to play. I know that you are very aware of that. I am stating this because you are comparing apples and oranges on that issue and it doesn't help your case. You may want to choose another F2P game to help support your argument in the future so that your point is more cohesive. In the realm it is now, bringing up AC actually hurts your case because of the pay-for/F2P status.

whether GRO is ready for Open beta is anyones guess at this point but it has to hit the point sooner than later for it to stay live. there is too little base players at most peak there are 300-400players or so. less people means less problems experienced so the small issue that occures doesnt matter but when release its a big issue. open beta is not mean it wont be tweaked anymore. when it is in open beta and release, it will always be tweaked its an online game. i ,like you, want GRO to be a perfect product but that means it wont be released for another 3 years, by that time there will be others like it. we need GRO to show what a quality F2P is. sure i know GRO is a F2P but the devs need money soon from GRO for it to continue. we need to support the game we love, they need help to continue working on it.

I think the most RP you can gain from a complete match is somewhere around 500, meaning in a match with 2 rounds, each round will likely award somewhere around 250 rp maximum. This varies greatly based on time spent in the game - faster matches reward less. The average player probably gets about 70-100 rp for a 10 minute game - and lets face it, currently, longer games are becoming less and less frequent as player skill increases, understanding of the objectives, MM flaws, and FT become more common and pronounced. But for the sake of argument and easy math, lets say the average player takes home a reward of 100 RP, or 10 RP per minute.

So currently, there is also the mechanic of MM/queue formation. I would say that for every 10 min game, you spend another 5 min waiting for the MM system to find a game, build the teams, load the game, do warmup, etc. So roughly 1/2 of your time spent "playing" is actually spent waiting for the game to start. This means that over a 3 hour play session, you will actually only be playing for about 120 min, and waiting for games for the remaining 60 min.

So the average player is taking home 1200 rp for their session. Depending on how they spend this, it can be a good reward or a poor one. For example, if you want to stay stocked on grenades - you're probably looking at buying a minimum of 25 grenades. That's 700 RP. You're also looking at buying armor inserts - I find a 70 rp insert will last me about 4 games - but it really depends on the level of competition and how often I die. But lets just say it's an average of 4 games. You buy 4 inserts every 4 games (if you have lvl 27 armor), or 280 RP every 4 games x 3 = 840 RP spent every 12 games. Already you can see that with just armor inserts and grenades, you have to be earning more than 10 RP per minute played just to maintain your income, as we're spending north of 1500 RP over a time that we've suggested nets us 1200 RP.

Now there are a lot of flaws in these numbers - we don't really know what the average RP per minute reward is, and the rates at which you go through grenades and armor inserts is highly variable, and of course with armor inserts and grenades, you can easily kill more people, meaning more RP (maybe - we don't even know how RP is calculated). I think that these numbers are probably off by a lot (for the sake of easy math) - but nevertheless, unless the rate of RP gain is double what I've outlined above, I don't see any way for an average player to ensure he is outfitted to the best of his ability, and save up for guns, addons, upgrades, etc. This also doesn't account for RP bonuses from completing challenges, 1st victory of the day, etc.

I would suggest that I average closer to 200 rp per game - I try not to buy grenades, using only the ones from quest rewards, but I do keep myself fully stocked on the armor inserts. However even with the larger net RP, I find it to be a rather long process to save up for better guns. The "problem" isn't apparent when you're looking at the lower end guns (lvl 1-15) because realistically, you can gain the RP to purchase those in a couple of play sessions. But when it comes to the monstrous costs of the high end weapons, I think this is really where the GC imbalance occurs. A lvl 30 weapon will likely take me a month of play sessions to save up for via RP - if I continue to spend my RP on inserts and/or grenades.

I don't know about you guys, but that's beginning to sound a lot like work, and a poor investment of time to me. I'd rather just spend the $7 or whatever it costs and buy the gun outright. This is where Ubi is going to make their money, and it's where the model becomes profitable. In the beta, I simply did not have the focus to get any of those weapons for a multitude of reasons. 1) I got bored, so I leveled up other classes and spent thousands of RP on them, instead of on my main guy, 2) I looked at the stats between the lvl 10 gun and the lvl 30 gun and it seems the lvl 10 gun is superior in at least 3 categories - so why bother, and 3) For the time and dedication spent saving up for that lvl 30 gun (which I have no idea if it actually performs better or worse than the lvl 10) - I could buy tons of grenades and apply them liberally in matches - which is more fun. All of these factors will still exist in open beta.

So I think the real problem here, from Ubi's standpoint anyways - is that while a lot of people will see those guns as unattainable via RP grinding and will outright buy them, it's likely that an equal number of people will see them as unattainable and simply not bother since lower level weapons seem better from the stats, plus time invested in a weapon makes the player more comfortable with the lower level gun, plus there is really no way to see if the higher level gun is better for your play style or not. Thus, there is very little incentive to get the high end guns. I suspect that if ubi were to implement some kind of way to test the guns (independent of character level) - that more people would invest in the game.

And make no mistake, those who choose to grind RP are just as valuable, if not more valuable than those who buy their guns with real cash. The players that grind will ensure the game has a player base that logs on regularly to play - where the guy who buys his stuff may become bored more quickly because he no longer has any goal to achieve. But as valuable as those players are, they probably outnumber the people who will actually buy GC 2 or 3 to 1, so the actual revenue stream will be limited. I think there are two major issues here for this game becoming wildly successful and popular. 1) lower level guns SEEM to offer better results than higher level guns in many cases 2) lack of an ability to test the expensive, higher level guns fails to reinforce a goal for the players who have stuck with their lvl 10 gun for months. IE: without a "real world" way to test the stats between the guns, players are less likely to upgrade - and those that do (depending on how the gun functions) may be more inclined to feel cheated and ripped off if the gun they buy doesn't out perform their lower level gun. Angry and disgruntled players are a poison to the F2P model - and the manpower it requires to moderate and refund purchases (from a development perspective, as well as a support staff (gm) perspective) can quickly outpace the additional income generated by the player base buying stuff in the first place.

It is issues like these that need to be tested out more (from a company standpoint) than the actual game at this point - the actual game itself seems to be relatively bug free. Thus, open beta will be arriving soon whether you like it or not.